Bites The Dust
by Homeslice
Summary: In this place you will sleep forever. [On and on until you shudder awake.] MikotoxItachi, implied KisamexItachi


1Summary: In this place you will sleep forever. (On and on until you shudder awake.)

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Pairings:

- - - -

_Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond – Me I turn around, I turn around. -'Je Suis Un Homme', Zazie_

- - - -

The bottoms of floors suck souls, and there is a monster in the closet. Itachi is raised on these ideals, and they tuck him into sleep at night where his mother will not, when she is sitting alone worrying and biting away the nail polish on her once neat and even nails, and often he will tell her when he is not asleep, 'it'll poison you'.

And it will.

Everything is poisoned in the Uchiha house, from the very edges of the window sills to Mikoto to Itachi. But it is theirs and it is grand.

- - - -

"He's our son." Fugaku says.

"He's _my _son." Mikoto replies, and her hair is a tangled cobweb of what it was before, as she clutches her hands to her chest in a sort of pitiful, secondary desperation (and you swear on the monsters in your closets and the soul-sucking-ness of your floors that you can hear her heart all the way across the room, a loud '_thump, thump_'). Itachi idly thinks of it when it was long and luxurious and running down her back, and he hushes the self-hatred from only having wanted to grow so he could reach it to touch it.

His self-hatred always must be hushed, and this is what all of the Uchihas do.

Most of the Uchiha women go insane first, faster-, women are nitpicky and self-conscious and idealistic, and they hardly ever bite their tongues and when they do, they most naturally bleed.

Itachi wonders if the child Mikoto is pregnant with, the one Fugaku doesn't know about and Itachi knows about but Mikoto doesn't think he knows, is a girl.

- - - -

"You should know that nothing matters," Mikoto says, with an air of finality, though her eyes state that the subject isn't yet finished, that he can be open to disagreeing, and she would probably then agree with him, as though eternal, ever-after pointlessness is a bad thing, as though it is good to be penciled in like some sort of story character with a high-and-mighty air of what is nothing and what is anything and what is everything.

"Yes, Okaa-san." is his reply, and it is as dull and _pointless _as those barely legible little series of tiny men planted in the middle of a quickly scrawled sunshine or grass field, distracting to the eye so that no one will see those people who are _his _and _only _his, like he is _only _Mikoto's son.

He is not Fugaku's, because he doesn't disagree. Mikoto would like him to, as she dislikes her husband and all of his traits and she would very likely like to dislike Itachi, but he is hers all the way and nods his head at every sentence.

He is a child who does not speak much, and when words are spoken it is accompanied by a nod, one or many or continual, and the continuity of a dirtied cycle is as bitter as a painting sloshed with unintentional color. All the artistic-ness of him has been splattered over, by a guilty but accidental hand, which is often seen swaying and trembling to words and emotion, and a large blotch of a most vile sort of black covers over that which might've, at

one point, been a man.

Here he is just a boy-, a boy who grows, nonetheless, in his studies and his aim, but never, ever his emotion. His feelings might as well be anxious and stricken, for they are as juvenile, being blank and cold and emotionless (and _pointless_) and anyone could mimic it, but most choose not to.

And just a few weeks ago Mikoto was telling him, "You should know that everything matters." and he, he had decided to himself (just a few weeks ago he was growing, growing up) that it is 'anything' that matters, which is a nice in between that allows room for movement.

The Uchiha house is cramped and unclear. Itachi wants a space that grows up with him, and not one which he is birthed into and says 'this is what I am– grow to it'.

It is a rather unhealthy goal, for a boy who cannot feel emotion.

- - - -

Itachi can count his age on his fingers (four, and you wait to be able to put that thumb into use just as you had waited to be able to touch the long waterfall of Mikoto's hair), and when he is bored and loses interest in the old, recycled life of the Uchiha house around him, he will lay, back down, on his sheets and bring up those fingers again and again.

(Four, four, four. Later it will become a sort of mantra-, the four of you, Mikoto, Fugaku, yourself, Sasuke, and the order in which you name them does not pass you by.)

At one point, when he had been learning how to count, he had asked Mikoto if she could also count out her age on her fingers, and her answer had been something along the lines of: "No, Itachi. Okaa-san is too old to do that." filled with gentle smiles and fake, fake meanings wrapped up in the eyes the lids were closed behind.

Eventually, when he had passed the barrier of thinking ten fingers meant you could only count up to ten, and when he had passed thinking that thirty-five could not be counted out on a hand, the true point to her words (she never was a _pointless _woman) does not pass him by, either.

- - - -

Itachi spends many of his years drawing fists, which seem, to him, to be a symbol of strength and power and what he works, and has always worked, so hard on mastering, what he possibly will never master and what he probably will (this mastering of drawing fists is just the same as mastering power, your young mind had thought, and when one is done, so will be the other). Eventually, he masters it, but tweaks little things each time-, and when, years and years (and years) later, he is sketching out one on an extra piece of notebook paper, the hand had been strictly feminine.

It was Mikoto's nails, which were always so unique and easily identifiable to him (any mother's hands should be identifiable to their child, you think), on his paper, flashing him like a hand of spread out, face-up cards on a table.

Kisame leans over his shoulder and asks why he drew it. Eventually, he asks if it's anyone's hand in particular– and Itachi gives the barest hint of a smile, which is moreover a simple twitch of lips, and missed by his partner who is leaning over his shoulder and who would only have gotten a view of his back.

- - - -

Mikoto's chest must be bare, he thinks, if he were to reach inside it. Later he will scorn himself (as he always scorns himself for the mistakes he made-, loving his mother or his hands hesitating before he sliced her throat, perhaps the very act of slicing her throat itself is something he still scorns himself for, and it is twice cursed but only half as bitter as he would like it to be) for thinking it, because as he cuts it open part by part, he finds nothing of what he imagined.

The imagery of a lost child is nothing compared to reality, because there is a heart there, there is a set of lungs and ribs and so much blood it spills over onto the floorboards only to sink in.

(It falls away from you like most things should, and you do not know this but in another couple of years there will be hands in that center fold of the room where your parents died, where you killed them, trying desperately to scrub away the blood and then after another year, trying with a lesser sort of indulgent obsession at the spot.)

Itachi forgets, and forgets, and forgets again.

- - - -


End file.
